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Chapter 15: Fourteen

Sunday, August twenty-seventh

[#WhatAboutGrindelwald (28/40) coincided with the mysterious disappearances of three towns along coordinate axes that same year, at what we now]

[#WhatAboutGrindelwald (29/40) know were arithmantically chosen dates and times; survivors when the wards came down were universally maimed so badly they were thought dead.]

Harry scrolled down and down the thread, morbidly fascinated: the discourse that had started from Sir's seemingly offhand comment had grown into a complete shitstorm overnight the likes of which no one could have predicted.

Unless they followed Muggle politics, he supposed.

[#WhatAboutGrindelwald (30/40) photos of survivors from the Sofia Museum of Modern Magical History (warning: NSFL): t.co/...]

"Hey, Harry, what're you readi-" Ron choked, taking several steps back.

Harry wondered if his friend would ever learn his lesson about reading over people's shoulders. With a sigh, he turned off his phone screen and set it face-down on the table. "Discussion of the war crimes committed by Grindelwald's regime," he explained to Ron. "Someone from a team searching for missing villages is sharing what they saw."

Ron shot a glance at the phone, pale. "Didn't know it was like that," he muttered with a grimace.

Neither had Harry, until now. Voldemort's words during Karkaroff's execution suddenly made a lot more sense. He'd never tried to imagine worse torture than the forms he knew of, had experienced, but that was... worse than the Cruciatus had been, Harry thought. It had been a long time since he'd felt this naïve, this young.

He glanced at the phone, swallowed, and suppressed a shiver.

Before they could discuss the topic further, thankfully, Hermione showed up in the room, oblivious to the atmosphere. "Harry, Ron," she addressed them, "Sirius wants to go shopping in Diagon. I've got to pick up an order from Flourish & Blotts, so if you need anything for school supplies, we're going in twenty minutes."

"Sounds good," Harry said before Ron could say anything, and went upstairs to get dressed.

Stepping out of the bookshop with the couple of textbooks for seventh year that he didn't already have, Harry was extremely tempted to sneak into Knockturn Alley for the things he really wanted. The obscuring hood was in the mokeskin pouch hung around his neck, as always; if he could just find an alleyway or an alcove where he could put up a privacy ward for a moment-

"C'mon, Prongslet," Sirius called, heading unabashedly down the intersection.

Well, that was a way of going about it.

Of course, now everyone was looking in their direction - Sirius Black was nothing but conspicuous. Harry kept his hands in his pockets, fighting the urge to slouch over while he walked; he cast his gaze about their surroundings in search of something more interesting than the apothecary Sirius had ordered more aconite from.

And, lo and behold, a bustling street fair down one side alley! Harry laid a hand on his godfather's shoulder - "see you in a bit, Siri-" and was off exploring before Sirius could say anything to the contrary.

What a fair it was! Most of the people were from a younger crowd, it looked like, around his age; Harry was about to wonder why when he stepped into one of the tents and found it much larger on the inside, laid out like an art gallery, and packed absolutely full of witches, with a few wizards here and there. What in the world..?

Harry turned to the nearest canvas on the wall, intending to circle around the room and see what everyone was so interested in, and stopped dead, jaw dropping.